Beautiful Life vs. Race/Culture Concepts: What’s the difference anyway?

Since the launch of our free, online Collection Analysis Tool (CAT) in October – which can tell you which racial/cultural groups are represented and how they’re represented on your bookshelves or in your collection – we’ve received lots of great questions from users about our nine unique book categories. The CAT draws on those categories to give users a snapshot of what messages about Black and Indigenous people and People of Color (BIPOC) dominate their bookshelves or collections.

In particular, many users have asked for a clarification about our Beautiful Life and Race/Culture Concepts categories, which are defined as:

• Beautiful Life: A Focus on Identity -- Books featuring BIPOC in which race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, culture, im/migration, and/or religious, sacred, or origin stories are central to the story. These books explicitly focus on the diverse expressions of human experience, depending on these elements to drive the storyline.
• Race/Culture Concepts: Examining Difference and Commonalities Books that explore and/or compare specific aspects of human difference, inviting readers to consider varying perspectives related to race, ethnicity, culture, or tribal affiliation.

Users ask:

If race and/or culture are central to both Beautiful Life and Race/Culture Concepts books, then what's the difference? If I want to use these categories to assess other books in my collection, like middle grade and YA texts, how do I know when to use which one?

While race or culture are central to both Beautiful Life and Race/Culture Concepts books, the Concepts books really do focus on a concept (e.g. 1,2,3 or A,B,C). This could mean that race/culture/ethnicity/tribal affiliation/immigration/religion is the concept itself in a particular picture book. Or it could mean that race, culture, etc. is the lens by which the concept being discussed is understood/explained. They also tend to be explicitly comparative.

Here are some examples of Race/Culture Concepts books:

In the following book, the concept of birthdays/celebrating birth is explored through a cultural lens, discussing various local traditions from around the world:

In this book, the concept of human difference itself (specifically, intersectionality) is explored:

Here the concept of immigration is explored through the lens of cultural diversity in Australia:

Finally, in this book different experiences of race in America are compared:

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Beautiful Life books, on the other hand, are books that take a "deep dive" into one particular cultural, religious, tribal, ethnic, or racial experience/tradition/practice, etc. Here are some examples:

This book takes a "deep dive" into one particular cultural practice in celebration of a little girl's birthday:

The following book explores the Chinese New Year through one family's experience:

In this book, a grandmother passes down the language and knowledge of her Interior Salish ancestors to her own grandchildren:

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To get even more granular -- here are two examples of books that explore the same tradition, Holi. The first is Race/Culture Concepts because it is comparative -- looking at Holi practices around the world -- and focused on explaining Holi as a tradition itself:

Whereas the follwing book is Beautiful Life because it takes a deep dive into one family's experience of Holi in India:

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Finally -- some books can actually be BOTH Race/Culture Concepts AND Beautiful Life!

This book takes up the concept of "blackness" but does so through a deep dive into black cultural expressions -- in this case, poetry:

And the following book explores the concept of space/place, but does so through individual artists' culturally-specific experiences of such:

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You are invited to use and explore our book Categories as you work to expand the diverse books and messages represented on your bookshelves!